permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

Here's a link to an article stating that 98 tons of fossil plant material is
needed to produce one gallon of gasoline. That's roughly 40 acres of plants.
Another way to look at it is that one day of planetary fossil fuel use is
about the equivalent of a year of the Earth's total plant production.

Also, to make all our petroleum from plants would need 50% more plants than
we harvest in total each year, just for the fuel alone. (Losses in
converting fossil plants to oil make them much less efficient to use than
fresh plants, which explains the discrepancy between the last two factoids.)

http://www.utah.edu/unews/releases/03/oct/gas.html

Toby